The Employment Expectations of Different Age Cohorts: Is Generation Y Really that Different?

If the existence of Generation Y is a viable explanation of employment behaviour, as is asserted in the burgeoning literature, then people between 18 and 33 (born between 1977 and 1992) will have markedly different approaches to work when compared with Generation X (1962 and 1976) and the Baby Boomers (1946 to 1961). This article reviews the evidence for the existence of Generation Y as a group with distinct and different attitudes to employment in comparison to Generation X and the Baby Boomers, testing for this difference using employment expectations of students as a proxy for employment attitudes. A secondary analysis of a 2007 survey of the postgraduation employment expectations of university students suggests that Generation Y students do not have fundamentally different expectations about future employment conditions when compared to Generation X and Baby Boomer students. For some employment conditions, there is some evidence that Generation X and the Baby Boomers may be more interested in employment conditions usually attributed to Generation Y than those within Generation Y.